She is known as the “mini-Merkel” but 56-year-old Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer knows that as she plots her ascent to the German Chancellorship over the next three years she must move out of Angela Merkel’s shadow.
As she was installed as the new leader of Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union yesterday, she wasted no time in delivering that message.
While paying a heartfelt tribute to her political sponsor, Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer – or AKK as she is universally known – also warned that she wouldn’t be the comfortable partner to Mrsk Merkel that many have been assuming.
Naming Mrs Merkel directly, she said that the electorate expected their leaders to do less navel gazing on big themes and spend more time on the mundane matters that they struggle with in their everyday lives.
“I’ve heard many people describe me as a mini version, or as just a continuation. But I stand here as my own person, as a mother of three, as a former interior minister, state leader, who has served this land for 18 years and who has learned what it means to lead,” she told party delegates. “And that leadership has more to do with inner strength than how loud you talk.”
Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer hails from the tiny state of Saarland on the border with France and has spent most of her adult life in politics.
She joined the CDU in 1981, first serving in her local youth division of the party. After a decade as deputy leader of the powerful Women’s CDU she then made the leap up into the party’s national committee in 2010.
But it was not until last year, when she managed to turn the tide against the Social Democrats in Saarland that she became a household name.
Months before the national election where the CDU slumped to its worst result since 1949 winning just 32.9 per cent of the national vote, she managed to secure over 40 percent of the vote in Saarland, marking her out as a winner in a field of losers.
It was her toughness as a campaigner that then convinced Ms Merkel to bring Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer to Berlin to serve as the party’s secretary-general, an appointment that quickly marked her out as the heir-presumptive.
On the campaign trail for the post of party leader, Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer gained a reputation for explaining her politics by means of homely anecdotes from her small village just a few kilometers from the French border.
She recalled how her husband worked down the mines with Turkish immigrants, saying that in the depths of a mine it was how hard you worked not what shade your skin was that counted.
As opposed to her more truculent opponent, Friedrich Merz, she appeared to win over delegates with her calm demeanour and quiet optimism about the recent past and also the possibilities for the future.
Delegates at the party conference spoke enthusiastically about her skills as a team player who has showed an openness to dialogue after almost two decades of stifling diktat from above under Merkel.
Analysts also predict that she is well placed to reunite the party and win back voters who have drifted off to the Greens.
Manfred Güllner, head of the Forsa institute predicted that she would attract young first-time voters to the CDU and that she had the qualities to bring a silent, disillusioned majority in the east of the country back to the ballot box at key elections next year.
Internally Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer will have to address the concerns of nearly half the party who voted her rival Mr Merz who offered to put clear-cut, conservative alternative to the Greens and Social Democrats.
“With only 35 votes different, she cannot change nothing,” said Andreas Biebricher, a delegate with the state of Rhineland-Palatinate who supported Mr Merz. “She has to bring the other 482 delegates with her. The CDU always stood for values and we need to get this identity back.”
It will be an uphill battle, but Dan Hough, professor of Politics at the University of Sussex who specialises in Germany said that Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer had the political skills to reunite the CDU after a contest that – while polite – had only emphasised divisions.
“She’s an integrator at heart and that natural tendency will come in very useful,” he said. “AKK may have won the race to be the leader of the CDU, but she’ll be keen to make sure her opponents don’t feel like they have lost.”